Halfway
by teegar
Summary: Sulu and Kevin Riley go in search of a nice shore leave, but end up spending an eventful few hours on a space station called Halfway.
1. Chapter 1

Halfway

Teegar

Work Text:

The pessimists said that if Galactic Ways Corporation ever left Halfway, the place would turn into a black hole within a week. The optimists claimed it could survive off sheer inertia for at least an eon. At this point, it looked like both sides had been right. Halfway was a shuttle station located at what used to be the most traveled crossing of passenger routes in the Federation. Even now, fifteen years after the last of the big blue Galway spaceliners had pulled out of its huge spacedocks, travelers on some of the smaller lines still caught a bite between changeovers or stayed the night in one of Halfway's hotels for longer connections.

On the other hand, in order to fuel this continued existence, the place had also turned into a black hole of sorts. Halfway had become the kind of a place that could swallow the unlucky or the unwary. Few innocents so consumed ever returned unscathed by the corrosive materials flowing in Halfway's voluminous bowels.

The station hung in space like a misshapen Christmas tree ornament. Its covering of reflective panels glittered as they fed off solar energy stolen from the sun Halfway orbited but had never thought enough of to give it any name other than Delta 795-I6.

Since the exodus of the commercial liners, it was not unusual to see Starfleet vessels like the U.S.S. _Enterprise_ docked there for repairs that did not necessitate a visit to the more extensive facilities on Starbases 12 and 5 that it lay halfway between.

"This isn't at all what I remember," Lt. Sulu, helmsman of the _Enterprise_, said to his friend Lt. Kevin Riley, the ship's navigator, as they stood in front of a Halfway store front. While the _Enterprise_ treated its forward shields for impact damage, they sought a cure for another type of ill.

"Maybe we're on the wrong level." Riley looked up at the four tiers visible above them in this section's open mall.

What should have been an Aldeberan-style diner/bar stubbornly persisted to be a grimy opaque windowed store front. It did not proclaim its business and sported a metal barricade that would have looked more at home on a border planet outpost. An "Open - Ring for Service" sign hung over a slotted port.

"It's the right level." Sulu's brow knit in frustration. "I know this place like the palm of my right hand."

Riley rolled his eyes heavenward. "This is what happens when you let the helmsman navigate."

"Okay." Sulu had to grin. "So maybe I haven't looked at my hand in fifteen years either."

"Oh, and I could just taste those brazed shoulder tips in Saurian pudding…!" Riley groaned. "Why did you have to tell me about it?"

Sulu took a critical look at his surroundings as his confidence in his bearings ebbed. What had once been an open mall that shone in Galway's glowing trademark colors of blue and gold now bore more resemblance to a combat zone.

Grit had collected on the sky-panels, dulling the starlight that shone through them. Many of the artificial lights were in disrepair. Large sections of paint had peeled away from the walls revealing the grey-green metal behind them. The walkways which had once been polished daily were now the greasy black of the decks of a mining scow. It disheartening to try to mentally superimpose the clean family-oriented station he remembered on this filthy den, but the call of real Aldeberan-style cooking prodded him on.

"It must be the wrong level," he said, resolutely squaring his shoulders and setting out for the nearest 'lift. "Let's try the starboard side."

"My stomach and I both hope you're right," Riley wished fervently as he followed him.

They hadn't gone far before Sulu recognized frontings of a pawn shop that used to be a souvenir store and a boutique that had transformed itself into a strip bar.

"No," he said sadly, turning around. "That was it."

Riley sighed. "I knew it was too good to be true. What now?"

They paused on the walkway to take stock of their possibilities. Garish signs promised every type of amusement imaginable to the sparse crowd of uniformed spacemen and ragtag civilians that peopled the walks. Kevin was reading one bar's description of their main attraction - Dee-Vankha and her Slime Devils - when the doors of that establishment flew open and someone flew out.

Unfortunately, Riley found himself straight in the path of that unguided humanoid missile and immediately found himself buried under a tangle of long arms and legs.

In a very surprising twist of fate that was to have a profound impact on the course of coming events, when the navigator pushed the stranger's calf off his face and turned to get a better look at who had tackled him, instead of saying something like "Watch where you're going, buddy," the Irishman blinked in astonishment. "Jeff?"

"Kev!" The stranger opened a pair of vividly blue eyes and grinned at Riley as if it were completely natural that the two of them should run into each other. "I was just thinking about you."

"Jefferson, what are you doing here?" Riley demanded as he accepted a helping hand up from Sulu.

The stranger raised himself to his elbows. "Don't call me that, Kev. You know that I don't like it."

Sulu couldn't tell if Riley was upset over the man having fallen on him or whether he just disliked the newcomer, but at any rate Riley didn't seem at all pleased to see his old acquaintance as he crossed his arms and asked sarcastically. "Well, who are you now?"

Sulu hoped beyond hope that they weren't going to end up trailing around all night with one of Kevin's old drinking buddies as he offered the man a hand up. He was particularly unenthusiastic about hooking up with an old chum who was prone to being thrown out of bars headfirst. However, knowing Riley and his usual taste in drinking pals, Sulu knew he now probably had as much hope of having a quiet dinner at a nice restaurant as he did of sprouting wings and flying away.

"T.J." the man introduced himself, shaking the hand that Sulu had offered before using it to rise to his feet. "T.J. Riley."

"Lt. Sulu," he managed to introduce himself in return as the man rose and kept on rising until he reached his full height of about seven feet.

"Sue and Lou," T.J. mused, scratching beneath his chin with a long forefinger. "I used to date twins named that."

Sulu gave Riley an `Is this guy for real?' look that the navigator missed by being too busy being unimpressed with the other's height.

"Well, I'm glad you still keep `Riley'," the Irishman was saying, apparently in an uncharacteristically scathing mood. "Or does that change by the month too?"

"Riley?" The connection of the last name suddenly supplied Sulu with an explanation of Kevin's rudeness. "Are the two of you related?"

Both men looked at him as if surprised that he should ask. They then turned and shared a long questioning look with each other as if trying to decide whether they were related or not.

Finally the taller man reached down and affectionately ruffled Riley's hair.

"Ah, ya ain't still mad at me, are ya, Irish?" he asked fondly, sounding and looking quite dissimilar from the brown haired, brown-eyed, five foot seven inch tall navigator. "Wait, don't answer that... Let me buy you a drink."

"You have money?" Riley asked incredulously.

`Oh, no,' Sulu groaned inwardly, resigning himself to the sad fate of spending the rest of his leave with Riley's loud, obnoxious, drinking buddy/cousin that not even the genial Riley seemed to particularly like.

"I've got better than money," the neanderthal in question was saying as he draped a long arm around Riley's shoulders. "I've got a tab."

"Hey, are you sure you want to go back in there?" Sulu stopped them as they turned towards the bar that the larger Riley had recently and dramatically exited.

"Best place in town," T.J. assured him as the door swooshed open to admit them.

Despite the smoke and purposefully ill lighting, Sulu could see that this reincarnated bookstore still carried vestiges of its former profession. The shielded shelves that once contained valuable antique volumes now housed a myriad collection of bottled substances of the usual description. The old high-fronted checkout counter was now a bar. And though the tape shelves were gone, the wide screen viewers once used to preview them were still being utilized.

Sulu couldn't help but feel saddened as he witnessed the very same viewer that had once introduced him to the delights of _The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ and _Sitiskitig, The Lion Boy of Tumoth_ now peddling pleasures of a vastly different kind.

There were possibly more people in the long narrow room than they'd seen collectively on the station that night. Most seemed to be locals. From the looks of them, Sulu figured they'd all acquired their wardrobes at the gigantic, station-wide, going-out-of-business sale that must have taken place fifteen years ago. Few were distinguishable as fish or fowl, let alone male or female.

"I'm back!" the taller Riley announced into the combined din of blaring videos, over-loud music and conversation.

The only response he got was a half-empty bottle of Bursa crème wine that came hurtling down at him from one of the upper galleries and burst against the closed door behind them.

"I love this place!" T.J. grinned as Kevin and Sulu quickly attempted to brush the sticky purple stuff off their uniforms. He waded into the crowd as nonchalantly as a flamingo would into a mud puddle leaving Sulu and Riley to push through the living wake that squeezed shut behind him.

"Jeff! Where are we going?" Kevin yelled - and then yelped as a third person accidentally "brushed" into him with greater intimacy than his current girlfriend had ever attempted. "I don't think I like this place."

"C'mon," the other Riley replied although he was facing a wall. With a little jump, T.J. caught hold of the railing above and hauled himself up to the upper level.

Sulu goggled in surprise, but none of the other patrons seemed to find this incongruous display of acrobatics worth a sideward glance.

T.J. dangled a long arm down to his kinsman. "My table's up here."

Kevin exchanged a look with Sulu who wasn't any more enthusiastic about wall scaling than he was. "Where's the stairs?"

"There aren't any," T.J. yelled back. "It makes it more private."

Riley gave Sulu an apologetic shrug. Sulu replied with a smile that was fatalistically cheerful and offered him a leg up.

Either the Bursa crème wine was not very good that night, or glass breaking was just the current behavioral rage, or the patrons felt that anyone in T.J. Riley's company needed to be doused with that substance, for two glasses and their contents splattered the wall as Kevin scrambled up. Another four - including the one that hit him in the back - graced Sulu's trip to the upper level.

"Well," T.J. remarked philosophically as they made disheartened swipes at their purple-stained uniforms, "As long as you smell like that, you might as well have a drink."

"Where's the _Lexington_, Jeff?" Riley demanded.

"I dunno," their host answered unconcernedly as he picked up an order pad. "What do you guys want? More of the same?"

"What do you mean you don't know?" the navigator persisted as he took a seat. "Are you ... Are you ...?"

"On vacation?" the other man substituted for the `A.W.O.L.' that they both knew was supposed to go there. "Yes. Yes, I am."

"Oh, Jeff…." Riley groaned as Sulu finally bent to the inevitable and sat down at the table.

"Oh, hell…" The other Riley's eyes were focused on someone in the crowd behind him. His face became tight despite his smile. "Company already? You guys just sit tight for a minute, okay? Don't look around. Everything's going to be O.K."

As soon as they were told not to look around, it became their most burning desire to do so. Kevin came slightly out of his chair as suddenly they were descended on from all directions by a group of amorphous shapes.

"Heyo, Riley," the one closest to T.J. said in an electronically augmented voice.

After his initial confusion, Sulu could tell that these beings were some sort of humanoids of slightly less than average height. Five of them positioned themselves around the table. All swathed from head to toe in thick layers of dark, padded clothing. With uncanny precision, they drew back their hoods revealing not faces but featureless black helmets. An eye visor ran around the circumference of the helmet making it impossible to determine where their faces were - if they had them at all. As if to purposefully compound his disorientation, the figures all spun around on a silent cue. It was now impossible to determine which of them were facing in and which were facing out. Sulu could feel the hair on the back of his neck rising in response to the bizarre-ness of their behavior, but Riley's cousin seemed to take it all in stride.

"Hello boys ... girls ... or whatever we are today," he said, leaning back in his chair. "You looking for me, or is this part of the floorshow?"

What could have been a hand under all its padding reached out and pushed Kevin back down into his seat.

"What's with the flitter and tripe?" another filtered voice buzzed from behind Sulu.

T.J. shrugged amiably and shook his head.

"Excessive inquisitiveness felled the feline they say," he warned pleasantly.

The figure behind Sulu made a barking noise that might have been a laugh. "Squirts of pissdom."

"Up for a little peek and poke?" the one closest to Riley's cousin asked.

"Maybe some other time," T.J. demurred pleasantly.

Again with unnatural precision, the figures spun around this time to face outward from the table. As they reached up together to pull up their hoods, Sulu thought he saw a glint of something as it dropped from the sleeve of one of the figures to Riley's cousin's lap.

"Who were they?" Riley asked as they melted back into the crowd.

"Do-nothing rich punks," his cousin dismissed them.

He was looking in the direction they'd disappeared in, but Sulu didn't fall for this magician's trick and saw him transfer the something that had been dropped from his lap to his pocket. "Local gang. I can't stand the little creeps."

"What language were they speaking?" Sulu asked quickly, in order to not appear to be particularly observant.

"That's a matter of opinion." T.J. punched an order into the electronic pad then passed it on. "Mostly rhyming slang today. You just have to know what they're saying to know what they're saying most of the time."

"Oh, I remember," Sulu recalled as Kevin scanned the list and punched in a selection. "Like `flitter and tripe' would be `glitter and stripe' - that was a nickname for the Security force."

"We're not wearing that kind of uniform," Kevin protested as he passed the order pad to Sulu.

His cousin smiled patronizingly. "Not on the outside."

"`Squirts of pissdom' would be `words of wisdom'," the helmsman speculated.

T.J. nodded. "That's how I took it."

"I don't get `peek and poke' though," Sulu said. "What did they mean by that?"

Riley's cousin smiled a Cheshire cat smile and shook his head. "Like I told the young ones, curiosity is a social disease that can sometimes take a fatal turn around here."

Despite the fact that this statement was delivered in the same mode and manner he'd been using all along, the threat implicit in his words made them seem violently out of character. Sulu looked at Riley who in turn frowned at his cousin. "Jeff, what's going on with you?"

"Too little and too much," he answered cryptically as the noise level from below rose noticeably. "I think I'm going to have to excuse myself."

"Now wait a minute," Kevin protested as he rose. "Where do you think you're going?"

"Just to the gents. Don't worry," he replied, then took Sulu's hand into both of his. "It's so good to meet you, Lt. Sulu."

As Riley's cousin pumped his hand, Sulu could feel something being pressed against his palm. "I like to see Kev hanging out with sensible, stable fellows like you," he continued and then instead of releasing Sulu, he put his hand down on the table and held it there. "Kevin's so impulsive. He needs to be around someone who's patient - who's not going to jump into things. You understand?"

"Yeah, sure." Sulu casually slipped whatever had been passed to him off the table under his hand and tucked it inside the top of his boot.

"Oh, come off it, Jeff," Riley complained, oblivious to the transfer.

A blinding beam of blue light buzzed past their heads and crackled against the ceiling. Someone from below with the aid of a universal translator and a powerful amplifier shouted, "Hold it!" into the split second of silence that shot though the bar. The noise level then screamed up to twice its normal decibel range as the patrons scrambled for cover. Riley's cousin unhesitatingly stretched his extraordinary height into a flying dive in the direction opposite the one where the blasts had originated. He'd almost completely disappeared into the writhing murk at the back of the balcony when three figures in black body armor emerged over the wall.

"Sit down!" This command issued at bullhorn volume from the armored plates protecting the face of one of the black-clad figures. It echoed in four other languages as the built-in translator did its duty.

One of the armored beings covered the crowd while the other two kicked open the doors at the back of the balcony - in the same general direction that Riley's cousin had so recently exited.

On the shoulder of the laser rifle brandishing things, Sulu was surprised to see the glittering blue insignia and gold rank stripes that were an unmistakable vestige of the gaudy uniforms once worn by the station's security force. `Halfway Security' - even their name had been a joke. They bore no resemblance to the malevolent creatures that stood here now.

"Shut up!" the deafening, multi-voiced command came in response to the low murmur that had sprung up among the patrons. Behind them, there were the sounds of multiple doors being kicked in. Below them, Sulu could see that the vast majority of the crowd was exercising the better part of valor just as he himself longed to do under these circumstances.

One of the black-clad figures emerged from the back. It removed the blast shield from its face revealing that "it" was an attractive young woman with black hair and blue eyes. "No luck."

The person guarding them also turned out to be female - this time a red-head with a feminine voice that didn't sound at all like a bullhorn when she pulled away her face plate to say, "Damn!"

The third guard was actually a man with unimposing Asian features who returned to announce, "He's gone."

"How can he be gone?" the red-haired woman demanded. "There's nothing back there except those bathrooms."

"Freeze," the brunette ordered, swinging her rifle to cover some patrons who'd begun to inch away. "Nobody's going anywhere yet."

"Who was with Riley?" the red-head asked and was immediately answered by a babble of voices and a myriad of appendages pointing out Sulu and Kevin.

Sulu swallowed, wondering how much worse this bad evening could get.

"Okay. Let's see some I.D., you two." The brunette and the Asian man trained their guns on them. "What's your connection to Terrance J. Riley?"

Sulu glanced at Riley who looked like he was just about to confess something really terrible.

"He's my brother," Riley said after a moment, admitting something that did seem pretty terrible at that moment.

"Congratulations, Mr. Riley," the red-headed cop retorted humorlessly. "You've got a brother who's wanted for murder."


	2. Chapter 2

A lot of fast talk and a call to their ship finally convinced the Security people that they didn't know useful about anything about T.J. or his past and present whereabouts. They were courteously shown the door to the bar and generously given twenty minutes to report back to their ship.

"What did he give you?" Riley asked, finally breaking the sullen silence between them as they made their way towards the nearest elevator.

"Why didn't you tell me he was your brother?" Sulu countered. "I thought lost your whole family on Tarsus because of…."

"Kodos?" the navigator supplied when his friend shied away from speaking that horrible truth.

"Yeah," the helmsman confirmed apologetically.

The Irishman compressed all the horror of that experience into a deep sigh and blew it out slowly. "Jefferson…Jeff… He was Jeffie then," Riley recalled. "Just a toddler. Had terrible allergies. Medical facilities on Tarsus weren't much, but we had relative on a commercial agriculture planet in a sector nearby. Said he could get him fixed up. No problem. The procedure was usually reserved for employees, but my uncle could pull a few strings. Ten months and our Jeffie would be back. Perfect little farmboy…"

"You grew up on different planets," Sulu concluded, realizing that perhaps having a surviving brother might be more of a source of constant anxiety rather than a comfort.

"My aunt and uncle never meant to have a kid." Riley shook his head as they stepped into the lift. "And Jeffie was always a brat. I've done what I could… but that was… nothing."

Once inside the enclosed car, Sulu reluctantly pulled out the object that Riley's brother had passed to him. It was a small chip of metal. On it were printed the tiny letters.

"Am in danger," the navigator read over his shoulder. "Pick up package at 235C. Box 112. Combination - 45960804."

"Riley, I know what you're feeling…" Sulu began firmly. "But…"

The Irishman reached out and changed the lift controls so that they'd let him out on level seven - where an address starting with a two and ending with a C would be. "I'm not asking."

Sulu knew it was an unbelievably stupid thing to do, but when the elevator doors opened he stepped out with Riley.

"Okay, we get the package and then go directly to the ship," he said, trying to convince himself that things could be that simple. "We don't know where to find him down here, but he'll know he can get in touch with you on the _Enterprise_."

"Yeah," Riley agreed resolutely.

235C turned out to be storage warehouse. After paying a few credits to a bored attendant, they were escorted back to a huge room lined with locked cabinets of a variety of sizes. Container number 113 was rather small. Inside it they found only a small box with a turquoise cover and black sides. It was rectangular - no more than six inches long and 4 inches wide. It was only about two inches deep.

"I guess we shouldn't open it," Riley said, obviously fighting with his own curiosity.

"Don't open it." This advice seemed to come out of the air above them.

"Jeff?" Riley asked incredulously as the grill of one of the ventilation ducts on a wall a few feet away from them pushed out.

"Hold this," Riley's brother wriggled out of the shaft and handed the grill down to them. He landed with a squishing noise that prompted Sulu to look down and notice that the tall man's left leg was wet almost up to the knee.

He didn't have much time to reflect on this peculiarity for T.J. gestured them forward and made a step out of his hands. "C'mon - You're being followed. There are cops all over the place outside."

Sulu vowed that he'd never go on another shore leave with Kevin Riley again as his brother boosted him up into the air shaft. After climbing in himself, T.J. wedged the vent cover back into place.

"It's going to be dark," he said, crawling past them, "and we'll have to crawl for a while, but everything's going to be okay."

Sulu had serious doubts about that, but there wasn't much choice other than to fall into line on his hands and knees behind Kevin. "Is this how you got out of the bar?"

"No." He had to assume it was T.J. who answered, because he couldn't even see his own hand in front of his face now. "There's a way to get out of any men's room on this station if you don't mind getting wet."

"Jeff, Officer Manheim said you killed a guy," Kevin said, before his brother had time to expound further on that intriguing claim.

"Officer Manheim?" T.J. repeated, coming to a dead stop and starting a chain reaction of collisions. "Michelle Manheim?"

The navigator, who was in the middle, got the worst of it.

"I don't know," he answered irritably.

"About six feet tall with red hair?"

"Yes."

"Damn."

The sound of crawling started up again. Sulu followed only to run into Riley as his brother stopped to ask, "Was there a black-haired girl too?"

"Yes."

"Damn."

This time Sulu let them get a good lead on him before following. "Does it make any difference?"

"They're both girlfriends of mine. Michelle Manheim and Racheal Lorca are in the same squadron, but don't know I'm going out with the other." Sulu was grateful when he heard the sounds of a ventilation panel being opened. "Man, it would have put a serious dent in my sex life if the two of them had caught me."

As the panel moved out of place, a hazy light began to penetrate into the shaft. Sulu could see first Riley's brother then Riley drop through the opening.

"I can't think of anything lower than sending a man's girlfriends out to get him." T.J. was grumbling as he helped him down the wall into the dimly lit area they'd entered.

Sulu could tell immediately that this forbidding and evil-smelling room had once been an apparel store of some sort. Denuded racks cordoned the large room into a maze of passages. He heard Kevin gasp as he backed into the arms of a mannequin. The only light in the room seeped in between the mesh of bars and smoky glass wall that separated the store front from the mall outside.

"Sorry about the smell," T.J. apologized off-handedly as he replaced the ventilation grill. "And about the lights - but the front glass is only one-way if there's no light in here."

He led them inside a door in the back of the store. Only after it had shut behind them did he turn on the lights. Sulu squinted in the unaccustomed brightness that confirmed his suspicion that this had originally been a dressing room. From the horrible smell of the place, it was hard to determine its current function. The space was divided up into little stalls. Most of them stood open and almost all of them were piled ceiling-high with clothes and shoes. Taking a step forward, Sulu noticed that in the stall immediately to his right was the prone body of a well-dressed blue-skinned man.

"Jeff!" Kevin knelt and checked the alien for signs of life. "This man is dead."

"As a Tuesday night on Juno," his brother agreed, unconcernedly continuing to strip off his wet shoes and pants. "You guys might want to change too."

Riley shared an uncomprehending look with Sulu before looking up at his younger brother. "Why?"

"Well, Kev, you are standing over a dead body holding about 5 million credits worth of illegal drugs." T.J. casually plucked a black body suit out of the pile. "I think you might want to keep a low profile."

Sulu closed his eyes and swallowed, hoping that he could live long enough to never take another shore leave with Kevin Riley.

"Drugs?" Kevin squeaked.

"Sorry," his brother replied, sighing as if he were being nagged about borrowing his brother's favorite shirt without permission. "You're not catching me on a good day, Kev."

"Oh, really?" Riley asked sarcastically. "Look, Jeff, I want a straight answer. Did you kill this man?"

His brother paused in the midst of stretching the impossibly small-looking body suit over his elongated frame.

Giving a straight answer apparently took some effort on his part.

"No, not directly," he answered at length, unable to resist hedging a bit.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means that I didn't kill him, but that I don't think he'd be dead right now if he'd never met me." T.J. fastened the neck of the body suit with a triumphant snap. "Thank God for one-size-fits-all, hey?"

"Who was he?" Sulu asked, as Riley's brother began to sort through a pile of black and grey padded survival jackets. "Was he the guy who wrote the message you gave me?"

"Right. Very sharp!" T.J. rewarded him for his astuteness by tossing him an oversized jacket.

"I suppose you're going to try to tell us that you were framed," Riley said, trying to sound sarcastic instead of hopeful.

"I hadn't thought of it," his brother replied, trying on an undersized coat then throwing it to him. "But I think you'll find that in most cases where the guilty are rounded up before the body has been discovered, something is not on the up-and-up."

Sulu supposed that if he, like Kevin, was concerned with the question of T.J.'s innocence, that this might have been an encouragingly convincing statement. However, since he was only interested right now in getting back on board the _Enterprise_ with his skin and his commission intact, the suggestion of a conspiracy pitting them against the local police was not a pleasing one.

Riley's brother finally settled on a jacket that fastened in the front but whose sleeves didn't quite cover his wrists. He slipped on his old shoes then pulled on a broad-billed all-terrain vehicle pilot's cap down low over his eyes and fastened with a broad strap under his chin.

When he straightened, he looked like a very tall version of the ambiguous figures that peopled the walkways outside.

Almost as an afterthought, he removed a small-gauged laser pistol from his other pants and put it into his pocket. "O.K. Give me the box and let's go."

Considering the nature of its contents, Sulu would have relinquished it gladly, but Kevin held onto the thing stubbornly. "Where are we going?"

"Well, I need to get to an un-monitored computer terminal and you guys need to get completely off this station," T.J. said, uttering the first sensible words Sulu had heard in hours. "Where's your ship?"

"We're in drydock on the port side," Sulu informed him, wishing to encourage this type of thinking in any way he could. "Access tubes 34 through 52 connect to it right now."

"But, Jeff," Riley protested. "You're A.W.O.L and wanted for murder..."

T.J. plucked the box from his older brother's fingers.

"...And holding five million credits worth of an illegal drug, I know. I can handle it, Kev. But let's get out of here before my old girlfriends start talking to each other and figure out where I am."

"But, Jeff..."

Sulu grabbed two caps from a heap and handed one to Riley.

"C'mon, Kevin," he said, guiding his friend to the door. "You can argue with him on the way."

"We can go through the vents most of the way," T.J. said, turning off the light before opening the door.

Although nothing about the murky appearance of the store seemed to have changed, Sulu could immediately tell something was very wrong. There was something too electric - too busy - in the air around them. Riley's brother must have sensed it too, because he immediately pulled out his gun. Sulu could see the light glint off the barrel as he said, "Someone's in here."

A thin beam of light sliced violently past him.

"Yeow!" T.J. yelped as it knocked his weapon from his hand with an audible crackle.

"You know I don't like guns, Riley." From a different direction came the sound of a woman's voice. She sounded young and had a peculiar sing-song accent. "Kick it away."

"Oh, sure, Chaxia. Anything you say." T.J. complied quickly, all the time shaking his hand to relieve the terrible stinging. "Oh shit, but that hurt! Shit, shit shit! You 'bout blew my damn thumb off that time, Tsu."

"Oh, I'm so sorry." The woman stepped out of the shadows. Her profile was lit well enough that Sulu could tell she was a small, well-built woman wearing a robe of some sort. As she came closer, he could see the finely chiseled Asian features of her face and the color of her shockingly platinum blonde hair. "I think you have something I want, Riley."

"I'm sure I do, sweetheart," T.J. replied gamely.

Four other figures in robe-length coats like the woman's emerged from the gloom carrying weapons.

"Perhaps it would be best if you and your friends placed your hands behind your heads and got down on your knees," the woman suggested sweetly as her associates moved to surround them.

Not liking that course of action at all, Sulu decided that it was a now or never situation. He chose now.

Grabbing the weapon of the man in front of him, he used it to lash out at the one behind him. Unfortunately he lost his grip on the gun in doing so, but wasn't shot by either man. The Rileys followed his lead - or at least he assumed from the noises around him. As soon as he was free he ran and dove behind the counter, figuring that was where the main controls would be. Only once there did he pause to consider that those controls might not be functional after all this time. He must have had some good luck left because after only a few seconds of fumbling he uncovered a panel that was gratifyingly full of lighted switches. Taking a deep breath, he reversed the settings on all of them as quickly as he could.

After nearly two decades of dormancy, the store sprang suddenly back to life like a crazed carnival. Incongruously happy music filled the air and lights blazed on from everywhere. The mannequin Kevin Riley was standing near glowed green and mechanically modeled its lack of clothing from side to side. A few feet in front of him stood the blonde haired woman who despite her stated dislike of guns was carrying a rather large one. Flame retardant foam rained down on the struggling figures making it more difficult to distinguish Riley's brother from his attackers.

"Run!" Sulu yelled over his shoulder to his colleagues as he sprinted for the slowly widening opening underneath the rising sheet of metal and glass blocking the store front.

A blue blast hit the glass above his head as he rolled under. At least a half dozen amorphous passersby had stopped to note the unusual goings on in the shop, but scattered as soon as he burst into their midst. Sulu scattered along with the best of them, hoping to use them for cover as he put as much distance as possible between himself and the shop. When another stream of blue light crackled against the walkway ahead and slightly to the left of him, he looked quickly behind him to find two foam-streaked figures in hot pursuit. This gave him sufficient impetus to increase his pace and turn off into the first right-hand passage that presented itself. Finding himself faced with a long run to a dead end, he checked desperately from side to side. He chose a dark corridor to his left that looked like it could offer temporary shelter. Sulu flattened himself against one wall and tried to bring his breathing under control as he considered his options.

Looking in front of him, he found himself faced with a door that announced in five languages and three forms of pictograph that behind it was a men's restroom. Sulu could hear the clatter of his pursuers' footfalls as he thanked his lucky stars and pushed the door open. After all, hadn't Riley's brother told them that a person could get out of any restroom on the station if that person didn't mind getting wet? At the moment, Sulu was prepared to crawl through raw sewage if need be.

As soon as he entered the dark room, both his common sense and his sense of smell told him that there wasn't going to be any water in this bathroom. Water-based waste disposal was cumbersome and inefficient and therefore rarely used on spaceships or space stations like this one.

Sulu reached beside him and found the lighting control panel.

Graffiti covered most of what had once been blue and gold checked walls. There were gaping wounds in the masonry where sonic wash units for humans and particle vaporizers for other species had been. Sulu could see fragments of himself pass in the shattered mirror as he walked past a line of urinals whose surface was half-corroded by an excess of the chemical that once made them functional.

As he passed the clogged jet spout of a Nebulan silicon bidet, he decided that this bathroom was possibly the dreariest spot on this whole dreary station in which to die.

At the end of the long line of plumbing disasters was a closed stall marked with an intricate geometric pattern. A part of Sulu's brain told him that this was a religious symbol, but couldn't supply him with the name of the sect or what peculiarity of belief would cause them to emboss their sign upon a public sanitation facility. Intrigued and feeling the help of a deity - anyone's deity - couldn't hurt at this time, he pushed open the stall door.

There in pristine glory stood a squat little flush toilet like a gleaming white shrine to the past century when they'd gone out of fashion. After a dazed moment of contemplation, Sulu realized that he still didn't know what he could do that would get him wet while providing a way out of here.

The sudden sound of footsteps outside forced him into action. Remembering that T.J.'s leg had been wet halfway up to his knee, Sulu stuck his foot in the toilet and pushed the lever. As the bowel overflowed, there was the sound of the door bursting open.

"Oh, great," Sulu thought. "So I'm going to die in an abandoned public rest area with one foot stuck in a commode."

At that moment, though, the _deux ex machina_ chose to kick into gear. Part of the wall behind the toilet slid away and he and the ancient plumbing fixture were drawn into the blackness beyond. Behind him an identical device rose from the floor to take the place of the one attached to his foot.

There was very little light after the panel slid closed again, but soothing music began to play and a recorded voice spoke to him in a language that sounded Acturian. Since he didn't speak that tongue, the message did nothing to cure his confusion as he blindly descended slowly in the darkness.

After a few moments, he was lowered into a lighted area. He found himself in a vast plain composed entirely of gigantic machines. All around him was the hum of things traveling through huge pipes. From behind the curve of a building-sized cylinder stepped a gnarled and dwarfish man.

The little man was fat and stump-legged and carried an old-style laser rifle that almost equaled his height in length.

His warty face was set in a gap-toothed sneer.

"Who the hell are you?" the dwarf asked in a voice that was surprisingly louder and larger than man-sized.

"I ... I ... I ..." Sulu faltered. It seemed as though his poor brain upon reaching its credulity limit for the day had gone on strike. "I'm lost."

The gnomish fellow waddled up closer, keeping his rifle trained at Sulu's head. "Get your frigging foot out of there, boy. Who showed you that trick? Wasn't that bastard Riley, was it?"

Sulu complied readily, but decided it was prudent not to admit any association with anyone that could be rightly referred to as "that bastard Riley".

"What's this doing here?" he said instead, pointing at the toilet.

The dwarf held his rifle on him a moment longer, then relented and lowered it with a long suffering sigh.

"Benenites," he answered shortly, but this helped clear things up somewhat for Sulu.

The Benenites were a religious sect who believed civilization should not have survived Earth's third World War. They observed strict taboos about using technology invented after the turn of the twenty-first century.

"We used to get bunches of them through here. 'Course these are only made up to look like old flush toilets, but they never found that out. I betcha couldn't tell that it was a single pipe fed mock up over a standard disposal unit, could you?"

"No, not at all," Sulu said politely.

"The only problem with 'em was that the Acturians would slip and use 'em." The little man shouldered his weapon and motioned him forward and deeper into the mechanical landscape. "You know how an Acturian loves water. Well, they'd get their long old asses sucked down into the pipework and we'd have to bring 'em down here to pull 'em loose. Not that I've seen an Acturian in years, mind you. It's usually them damn punk kids running from the cops or that damn bastard Riley on the lam from somebody's husband."

When they arrived at the center of another lighted area, the small man reached up and pressed the call button of mechanical configuration that Sulu recognized - to his great relief - to be an elevator.

"I keep answering the buzz though," the gnome continued. "I figure that with my luck the one time I don't bother to come running I'll be leaving an Acturian bigshot with his ass sucked up the john and then my boss will have my liver for his lunch."

The doors opened and the little man propelled Sulu into the lift car with a shove.

"You tell Riley one thing though," he warned, giving his huge gun a shake. "You tell him and his buddies that I'm shooting the next thing that drops down my tube that ain't Acturian. I'd don't care who that are or what they've got stuck up the pipes!"

* continued *


	3. Chapter 3

When the lift doors opened again onto one of the main floors of Halfway's commerce area, Sulu was surprised and more than a little disappointed to have T.J. Riley step out of the shadows to meet him.

"Kevin's not with you?" he asked, sounding concerned for the first time in their rather eventful first few hours of acquaintance.

Sulu shook his head.

"Damn," the tall man swore. "That means either Chaxia or Security has nabbed him. I followed the guys following you and figured that you'd show up here sooner or later ... or not show up anywhere at all ever again."

"Yes." Sulu shook out his wet pants leg. "Thanks for the tip about the bathrooms."

"You're pretty fast on the uptake for a guy named after two girls," Riley said and Sulu chose to take it as a compliment. "Have you got the key?"

"What key?"

"The thing I gave you with the message written on it. You still got it, right?"

"No. Kevin had it."

"Shit, shit, shit!" Riley punctuated each curse by beating his fist against a nearby pillar. "Things are beginning to not go well."

Sulu decided that if even this lunatic was beginning to be concerned, it was well past time for him to make an exit.

"Listen, I've got to get back to my ship. I'll notify ship's security of what's happened to Kevin and ..."

"Hmmmm." T.J. rubbed his lips and considered for a moment. "Beaming some Marines in is seeming like less and less of a bad idea ... But the two of us could ..."

Sulu shook his head firmly. "I'm in way over my head."

"Okay." T.J. agreed reluctantly. "But let me just find out where he is ... It'll only take one call."

Sulu hated to be with this walking menace a moment longer than necessary, but knew it would be pretty useless to report Kevin missing in this maze. With no clues to his whereabouts, they could look for him for years without ever finding a trace. "All right."

The tall man pulled him into the corridor he'd emerged from. "What's your first officer's name?"

"Commander Spock," Sulu answered, disliking this idea immediately.

Riley's brother shook his head. "Who's someone else high up? - A human."

"Lt. Commander Roth is in charge of Security," Sulu admitted, choosing someone he didn't particularly like. "Steven M. Roth."

Riley herded him quickly down the corridor to a comm unit. "This'll only take a minute," he assured him as he pressed a set of instructions into the voice-only panel.

"Halfway Security," a crackling voice answered.

"Yes," T.J. lowered his voice to a more military tone. "This is Lt. Commander Roth of the ..."

"_Enterprise_," Sulu mouthed quickly.

T.J. faked a cough and cleared his throat. "Uhm... Excuse me ... Steve Roth of the _Enterprise_. We're missing one of our officers. Have you picked up a Lt. Kevin Riley, by any chance?"

There was a short pause before the voice answered.

"No. We have a few enlisted men from the _Enterprise_ who were arrested in a bar fight, but no officers and no Rileys."

"Thanks," he said, closing off the channel. "That was simple enough, wasn't it? And now we can figure that Chaxia's got Kevin."

"Where would they take him?"

"To the Sisang warehouse probably." T.J. chewed his lower lip, as he weighed several courses of action. "Listen, do me one more favor. Okay?"

"What?" Sulu asked cautiously.

"Turn me in," T.J. said, pushing him towards the comm unit. "I want you to call in an anonymous tip that wanted fugitive T.J. Riley was sighted near building 449G on level fourteen. It'll take them about fifteen or twenty minutes to pass it though command and mobilize somebody down there, but it can't hurt to have a little backup until you and the marines arrive on the scene, right?"

This sounded reasonable, which made him even more suspicious. When T.J. Riley started making sense, it seemed like time to doubt one's perceptions of reality. However, it did seem possible that concern for his sibling could be driving the man within the ranges of sanity. "Okay."

"Stand back in case they try to switch over to visual," Riley warned as he punched in the call code.

"Halfway Security."

"Ah, yes," Sulu choked out of his suddenly dry mouth. "I want to report that I just saw T.J. Riley on level fourteen near 449G."

"Who is...?"

Riley snapped the machine off mid-utterance. "Thanks."

Sulu let out a long breath, feeling like a pre-teen prankster. "Okay. I'm going to call my ship now."

"Nope," Riley said, removing the grill from the ventilation duct on the wall above the comm unit. "Now you're going to come with me."

"I'm going to what?"

Riley used the comm unit as a step ladder to boost himself into the shaft. "It'll take Security twenty minutes to get to the warehouse, but they've already traced that call and will have someone here in about five seconds."

"Oh, my God." Sulu imagined that he could hear the sound of running footsteps heading towards the corridor.

Riley grinned at him and dangled one long arm down. "And since I planted that box of drugs on you five minutes ago, I suggest you get up here fast. Don't forget the grill."

"Oh, my God!" The reason for Riley's uncharacteristic amount of contact became horribly clear as Sulu frantically patted the many pockets of the padded jacket and realized he'd never be able to dispose of the box quickly or completely enough even if he did find it. Finding himself again with too little time and too few alternatives, he grabbed the vent plate with one hand and Riley's arm with the other.

"Take the first left," Riley ordered as he hoisted him up and carefully replaced the grill. "It'll be just like riding a great big slide. But don't scream or anything, okay?"

Sulu made no promises as he scrambled on his knees along the dark passageways. He was sure the footsteps he heard now were real as he went head first down the opening he felt to his left.

It became harder and harder to follow Riley's instructions as his descent went on longer and longer and the angle seemed to become steeper and steeper. It finally became impossible not to make any noise when the duct finally leveled out and all seven feet and two hundred some pounds of Kevin Riley's overgrown brother came hurtling into him from behind. "Ow!"

The hand of Riley groped for him in the darkness. "You okay?"

"Yeah." He fended him off warily, remembering the ill consequences of their last supposedly casual contact.

"Good." Riley crawled past him, taking the lead. "C'mon."

Sulu wiped the sweat from his forehead then scrambled after the sound of crawling ahead of him. "Tell me something - Was there one particular thing you did to Kevin to make him mad at you, or was it just a cumulative effect?"

From ahead of him he could hear Riley laughing softly. "He's jealous because I'm taller than he is. Take the next right."

"Surely you're not the only tall person in your family," Sulu speculated when he finally decided he couldn't stand crawling around silently in the dark anymore. "You must have tall uncles or aunts or cousins…"

"Or not," answered the voice ahead of him merrily. "Could just be me. Turn left."

Sulu frowned as he contemplated this genetic improbability. He recalled Kevin's story of his brother's being sent offworld for an "allergy cure." Although genetic experimentation on Human subjects had been strictly regulated since the middle of the twenty-first century on Earth, there were persistent rumors that scientist on far-flung colony worlds had continued their research. Closed worlds like the commercial agricultural planet Riley had alluded to were often sources of wild tales of strange beasts and augmented humanoids.

"Ooops." T.J.'s voice came from the direction of the new heading. "Shouldn't say things like that in front of a thinking man like you."

A number of things that the helmsman had dismissed in the light of the station now began to nag at him in the dark – Like the way Riley's brother had small teeth. Although his frame was thin, his body was proportional for someone seven feet tall – except for his tiny teeth, which might have been more at home in the mouth of someone who was meant to be five foot seven. And then there was the peculiar way the young man would lift his upper lip and scrunch his nose as if smelling something undetectable to those around him...And the way he was speeding them through these vents with those peculiar blue-blue eyes of his…

Sulu frowned. His vision of the genetically-engineered _homo superior_ was always going to be more along the lines of Khan Noonian Singh than Kevin Riley's obviously lame-brained, disaster-prone brother.

"Don't get carried away," that sibling warned as if following these thoughts. "Kev gets mad at me because he thinks I'm annoying."

"Oh, I get that," the helmsman assured him, wondering how he was going to explain the growing blisters on the heels of his hands to the ship's doctor - if he ever saw the ship or the doctor again.

"He still thinks of me as a brat," T.J.'s voice said. "I guess our problem is that Kevin's a real straight-forward type guy and I'm the type who's always looking for short cuts. There's no halfway point for us to meet - That's a laugh, isn't it? I mean, here we are on Halfway and I keep losing him..."

Sulu was considering a reply when Riley suddenly slowed to a halt.

"Shhh," he warned. "I think this is it. I'm going to open a vent and check."

"...Don't know anything," came a panicked voice that was recognizably Kevin's. "He's my brother. I don't know anything about the box or where it came from. I've never even been to this station before."

"I'm sorry to make your first visit to Halfway so unpleasant, Mr. Riley," came the husky sing-song voice of the blonde-haired lady from the clothing store. "But you're being so stubborn."

There was the sound of something electronic being turned on followed by an agonized cry from Riley. His brother muted the sound of it with the grill.

"Good," he said unexpectedly. "Chaxia could play with him like that for hours without killing him. She's got him hooked to a flux feedback generator. It can surely shock the shit out of you, but it doesn't do any permanent damage."

"At first," Sulu added realistically.

"Well, we're going to see that he won't have to put up with it much longer." Riley pressed a small cylindrical object into his hand. "I want you to stay here. I'm going to open this vent so you can see and hear what's going on down there. When you hear a disturbance, it'll be me. As soon as they're distracted, press the button at the bottom of the canister and lob it into the middle of them."

"What is it?" the helmsman asked, hefting the device experimentally.

"Chrytozacpht," Riley answered, easily wrapping his tongue around the unwieldy alien word. "Denebian sleeping gas. I lifted it off one of Chaxia's goons. I figure that they'll appreciate the irony."

"If it's a gas," Sulu replied, immediately spotting the weakness in this plan, "then it'll go right up into the ventilation ducts and knock me out too."

There was a moment of appreciative silence from Riley.

"You do catch on real fast. Okay, there's a ladder about fifteen meters to your left. Eight rungs up and you'll come out in an alley behind a restaurant on level thirteen. Walk - do not run - to the nearest lift and go up to level nine. Stay close to the building, but otherwise act completely casual. Make your way to 219K. That's Jeshish Storage. Put your jacket in locker 0619. Can you remember that? Jeshish Storage, locker 0619 - That's the same as June 19th - my birthday, if that makes it any easier to remember. Here's the key."

Sulu reluctantly took the pass chip on a chain that Riley had apparently been wearing around his neck. "Listen..."

"I know that you don't know me," T.J. interrupted. "And you have no reason to trust me from what you do know of me. But don't ditch this coat or the box if you find it. A lot of lives other than my own are depending on this."

In a deft strategic move, Riley chose that moment to remove the ventilation plate. It not only cut off any attempt at rebuttal by Sulu, but also added the extra emotional appeal of his brother's agonized cries to his argument. Sulu had no choice but to sit silently as the other man crawled off into the darkness.

Sulu looked down into the room below. At first the only figure he could make out was the outline of Kevin Riley. His body writhed on the table he was strapped to as a band of light traveled beneath him. Had Sulu lived during an earlier age, he might have thought that it looked like his friend was being photocopied. Other less distinguishable figures became visible in the moving green glow as his eyes adjusted.

"Surely you are inclined to be more cooperative now, Mr. Riley," the voice of the woman Riley's brother had called Chaxia scolded mildly. "Tell us about the box and we'll be glad to release you."

For a few seconds the only audible sound was Kevin's ragged breaths.

"Listen, lady," he managed to say in between painful gasps. "All I know is this ..."

How much Riley was prepared to reveal at that point was doomed to remain a mystery, for at that moment his brother burst through a door at the far end of the warehouse closely pursued by two members of Halfway's Security force with laser pistols blazing.

Unhesitatingly, Sulu primed the gas grenade and threw it into their midst. Without waiting to see where it fell, he took off immediately for the ladder. He didn't even waste the time it would have taken to hope that the canister landed right at the feet of Riley the younger.

As promised, he found a set of handles in the wall leading upwards, but had to hold his breath as the air around him took on a chemical odor. His heart was pounding in his ears by the time he lifted a panel in his ceiling and emerged from the floor of Level Thirteen into a dingy trash-strewn passageway that stank of cheap Vegan broilfish stew.

He climbed out and replaced the cover as quickly and quietly as possible.

Shoving his hat a little lower over his eyes and pulling his collar a little higher around his jawline, he stepped out from the shadows of the alleyway into the grimy light of Halfway's main walkways. Halfway and its denizens seemed remarkably unaffected by the chaos he'd undergone for the last few hours. Passersby walked past him with their customary studied inattention. The only sounds floating past were the garbled and faded echoes of a bar band on another level.

As he passed a comm unit, Sulu was tempted to drop his masquerade and call the _Enterprise_, but he knew that he couldn't get anywhere near the ship with what was in one of his pockets. He didn't trust Riley's brother as far as he could spit him, but somehow he couldn't bring himself to just leave the jacket in an alley somewhere.

`Jeshish Storage is on the way to the ship,' he rationalized to himself, pretending that he'd been unaffected by T.J.'s plea.

The first elevator he came to was out of order. The second one he passed by because it was already occupied by characters who seemed seedier than normal. Sulu began to panic when he found a guard posted at the door to the third one, but a closer look at the outfit the man was wearing revealed that this guard was not Halfway Security, but rather a hireling of a private club, posted to deny or grant access to the exclusive top levels. By the time he finally reached the fourth elevator, his abused knees were beginning to give out on him. He allowed himself to slide down the wall of the lift car and travel the rest of the way to level nine in a seated position ... Or at least that had been his plan.

After an unmercifully short interval, the lift doors opened and two black armored security men burst in pushing a manacled person that Sulu could have sworn was one of Chaxia's henchmen between them.

"Clear the lift!" one of them bellowed at him in an enhanced voice that reverberated in four languages.

He scuttled out on all fours, not daring to speak or look up.

Sulu remained in the same position for a moment after the doors closed behind him, not trusting his legs to hold him until the need to remain inconspicuous reasserted itself within his brain. His walk was more of a stagger as he tried to keep moving.

`This isn't doing any good,' he thought, coming to a shaky halt in front of a former arcade that had turned with little alteration into an all-night diner. Without thinking about what he was doing, he began to search his pockets for change. When his fingers hit something considerably larger in the pocket in the middle of his back, he remembered what else was supposed to be in this borrowed clothing.

`Well, at least I know it's really there,' he told himself, but was not at all comforted by the thought. In another pocket, he found a credit piece that was more than sufficient to cover the cost of the caffeinated beverage he craved.

A few hours ago he would have shied away from entering such an ill-lit place populated by blank-faced people swathed in rags, but now it seemed like a blessed haven. He chose a table next to the front window and ordered using a key pad. His drink came in a pneumatic tube that ran along the ceiling from the front counter with outlets at each of the tables. He stuck his credit piece in a slot and the top popped open. He was so grateful for the drink and the courteous inattention the other patrons were paying him that he never noticed that he didn't get back any change.

From this relatively secure and comfortable vantage point, Sulu kept a sharp eye on the goings on outside. It seemed to him that he saw other robed figures quick-marched to the lifts while he sat there, but he couldn't be sure.

His body if not his spirits were replenished by the brief respite and rose obediently to convey him again on his trek to the upper levels. He approached the lift he'd been ordered out of cautiously, but the doors opened on no black-clad figures and none interrupted his journey upwards.

To his surprise, level nine looked almost exactly like the lower level he'd just left. It seemed to him that a place that had taken so much trouble to reach should be brighter, shinier and generally more worthwhile in appearance. He realized with a sudden pang that he'd forgotten Jeshish Storage's number - although he could recall that it started with a two - like every other place on this level - and had a locker in it whose number could be remembered by recalling that T.J. Riley's birthday was June 19th. Mentally flipping a coin, he decided to start his search with a sweep to the left.

Sulu hadn't gone far when he realized that he was being followed. His stomach clinched, but he forced himself to remain at a steady pace as he made a wide right-hand turn which allowed him to catch a peripheral glance at his pursuer.

Instead of the black clad or robed figure he dreaded, it seemed he was being followed by something that was more machine than man. It stood roughly man-sized - around five feet tall - and was very stout in build. Its long, arm-like appendages hung to below its knees as it moved along at a jerky mechanical pace. Its head was a pointed grey box with a glowing red eye slot and a square speaking/breathing vent.

Sulu didn't know what it was or what it wanted with him and decided not to find out. He cut down a corridor and pressed himself against the wall as the machine-thing passed.

He leaned out to see if he'd fooled it and found himself face to face with its glowing red eye.

"Phreyzat gehat glbany," it seemed to say in a mechanical monotone.

"I don't know what you're saying," he protested, backing away from it.

The machine thing repeated a word several times that sounded curiously like a curse.

Taking a chance that it wasn't armed, Sulu sprinted away from it. However the thing drew alongside him as quickly as if it had wheels.

"Jeezaph cheng gazeht!" it commanded, reaching out a long arm in front of him to bar his way.

Sulu ducked under the arm and took the first left-hand corridor that presented itself to him. Mercifully this placed him on the very doorstep of Jeshish Storage.

"Can you show me to locker 0619?" he breathlessly asked the uniformed attendant at the door.

"Sure," said a voice that was strangely familiar.

Sulu realized where he'd heard it before as the guard pulled off the cap that concealed her long red hair and leveled her laser pistol at him.

"You're not the birthday boy I was expecting," said T.J. Riley's ex-girlfriend Security Officer Michelle Manheim, "but you'll do."

* continued *


	4. Chapter 4

Halfway's current station manager was Ethridge Evans. Evans was an unusually handsome man for a human of his age and his office was by far the most attractively modern place on the station, but Sulu was in no mood to appreciate such things as the guards escorted him into that office and placed him in one of Evans' fine chairs. He was only marginally impressed to find that a conscious but pale Kevin Riley was seated in a similar chair beside him wearing a similar pair of handcuffs. He didn't even care that the machine thing they'd arrested along with him was placed behind him with its moving parts immobilized by magnetic locks. All Sulu had eyes for at this moment was the box they'd taken from him.

It sat on Evans' tasteful desk in a neat row with the chip that had had the message on it and the key to locker 0619. The lid of the box was open and its contents were revealed for the first time. An unimpressive substance that looked like yellow salt sat askew on top of the box in a clear bag.  
"Gentlemen," Evans addressed them in his resonant and impressive voice as he picked up that clear package. "I'll assume for the sake of argument that you don't know what this is."

From the sorrowful way Riley bit his lip and glanced at him, Sulu thought for a second he might have some idea.

But he dismissed the thought after a few seconds worth of reflection told him that the navigator had plenty of other reasons to feel guilty right now.

"These are roaminassic crystals." Evans turned the bag in his hand so they could see the way the yellow stuff sparkled in the light. "In its pure form, roaminassic is a relatively harmless mineral. But when distilled into crystals as it has been here, it becomes a powerful hallucinogenic drug with a deadly side effect."

Riley looked as if he couldn't get much more miserable.

Evans moved closer to him as if to capitalize on this.

"Being addicted to roaminassic crystals is something like being addicted to arsenic," he explained, holding the hideous stuff under their noses. "It has a poisonous byproduct that is gradually released into the system of the user. If you miss one dose, you die. If you take enough doses you die anyway, but most users don't care about that by then. After prolonged use, the roaminassic begins to disintegrate brain tissue. So you see, roaminassic crystals have become one of the galaxy's rarest and most expensive drugs. The people who are addicted to it simply can't live without it.

People will kill to get a portion of this stuff so small that you could hide it in your hand. So how did you gentlemen manage to turn up with a bag full of it worth more money than the two of you will probably ever see in your combined lifetimes?"

Sulu was half-tempted to tell him, but it was such a long story and he was far too tired to remember it all right now.

"We know you're not alone in this," Evans continued. "Tell us who your partners are. Tell us where your brother is, Lt. Riley."

At that Kevin's mouth clamped into a firm line.

"All right." Evans walked back to his side of his desk and thumbed a button on a panel. "You may not want to talk to me, but you'll have to talk to your captain. Send Captain Kirk in, please."

Both Sulu and Riley stood as the doors slid aside to reveal their captain who strode into the room with a set jaw and reddened face. "Sir!"

Behind them, the forgotten machine-thing sprang to life. Guards trained weapons on it as its arms clattered to the floor and its metal head fell off to reveal a familiar blond one underneath.

"Oh, shit," T.J. Riley wheezed, grabbing his accustomed space in the spotlight with typical lack of grace. "I thought I was going to suffocate in there."

Every gun in the room was trained on his head.

"Freeze!" someone shouted, as if that were called for.

"Wait a minute, wait a minute!" T.J. was able to wave the fingers of one hand though the neck hole of the machine disguise. "I'm just going to get out a little card."

There was the click of triggers being drawn into place by nervous fingers, but T.J.'s hand reemerged bearing only a thin piece of plastic that looked like an official I.D. card.

"Ethridge Evans?" he asked.

The station manager's face was drawn into a puzzled frown. "Yes."

"I'm Lt. Terrance J. Riley of the Special Intelligence branch of Starfleet Command," he announced with a charming smile. "And you're under arrest as an accessory to the illegal manufacture and distribution of roaminassic crystals."

Several other surprising things were revealed in the general hue and cry that followed. One of the very first things that Sulu and everyone else found out was that the most important thing about the box they'd been carrying around like a hot potato for the past few hours was not the package of roaminassic crystals it contained. Much more important was the computer disk stored in the secret panel in the false bottom of that little box. Sulu was also interested to find that this secret panel was opened by the chip that had had the message written on it - explaining the value of that object.

On the computer disk was a record chronicling many crucial names, places, dates, amounts, and events in the sordid history of Halfway's drug empire. It turned out that Etheridge Evans was able to tell them so much about roaminassic crystals because he was in charge of the organization. The harmless mineral that he'd spoken of was only found on the moons below Halfway - a fact he'd been able to suppress in geological reports that should have been public record.

The disk was made by Phzat Dzod, a highly placed accountant who'd been pressured into the admission by a young Special Intelligence operative who'd been sent alone to Halfway not to bust a drug ring at its heart but to investigate the distribution lines roaminassic-laced calucimide that was being sold to servicemen on leave.  
Posing as an unwary spaceman, T.J. Riley, who - after much shouting and disbelief on the part of even those nearest and dearest to him - was positively identified in a few deep space calls to highly placed people as actually being a _bona fide_ agent of the Special Intelligence branch - discovered he was in not only a distribution hub but the manufacturing center for that drug. To Lt. Riley's distress, he also found that station's official administration was involved to an extent that made it impossible for him to get a message back to his superiors.

Riley's cover - no doubt strained by the fact that he was dating a surprising number of Halfway Security's finest - had stretched to the breaking point the night he found his contact Dzod dead in his hotel room. The two of them had arranged a large transfer of evidence that evening under the cover of a drug deal designed to enhance both of their shaky reputations as low life. Things would have been very dismal indeed for Agent Riley had he not had two great strokes of luck. The first was that Phzat Dzod was killed by Evans' men hours after his half of the transaction with Riley was in the hands of intermediaries. The second lucky break came when Riley, gambling that this was the case, had risked capture to make his rendezvous with Dzod's runners and had unexpectedly run into his brother. Actually anyone in a Starfleet uniform would have done as well. With a Federation ship in dock, all he had to do was to get aboard it with his evidence intact. Meeting up with his brother had simply given the evening an extra dramatic twist.

Sulu stood with Kevin Riley on a balcony of Halfway's Administration complex appreciating the excellent view of the lower levels and very glad to not be the one who was dramatically twisting for a change. They'd been making bets while they waited for Riley's brother to come out on whether more lawyers than policemen had arrived on the scene. At present the lawyers were slightly ahead.

"I don't know what to say to him," Kevin said, running a hand through his hair nervously. "I mean I was so wrong about him."

"I don't know how wrong you were," Sulu replied, too tired to be overly tactful. "Special Intelligence operative or not, he's rash, reckless and irresponsible. He blended in with this place awfully well. I'm glad he turned out to be on our side, but he's still a scary guy."

"He's always been wild," Riley admitted. "That comes from growing up without parents, I guess. But his heart's in the right place. I think he's turned out a lot better than I've given him credit for. I've just got to meet him..."

"I know," Sulu interrupted, massaging his aching head. "You've just got to meet him halfway. I just wish I hadn't been at Halfway when you met him."

"You guys still here?" Riley's brother came out onto the balcony stretching and yawning.

"Nobody's told us we could go yet," the navigator answered. "Are they through with you, Jeff?"

"No, Kevin," T.J. corrected smugly. "_I'm_ through with _them_ \- for a while. Oh, Lt. Sulu, I'm sorry about the screw up with my disguise. The translator unit got stuck on Pharsian and I couldn't get it to switch back over to Standard to warn you about the trap at Jeshish Storage. Sorry if I scared you, but things turned out okay."

"They seem to have," Sulu said, reserving his pardon at least until the blisters on his hands and knees went down. "Do you think you have enough evidence to bring down Evans and his men?"

"I hope so," T.J. answered in a rare moment of complete soberness. "There's nothing more I can do."

"You're damn right I did," the younger man replied in his usual, brash manner, but there was a look in his eyes that betrayed how deeply he was touched by his brother's gesture. "Aren't you guys hungry? Let me take you out."

"Oh, no," Sulu interjected quickly. "I'm sure they're going to want us back on the ship..."

"Oh, I'll take care of that," T.J. promised, throwing a long arm around each of their shoulders. "Like I told you, I've got tabs at all the best places in town. Kevin, I know you like Aldeberan food and I know this place that fixes a brazed shoulder tip that you won't believe. Doesn't look like much, but…"

Sulu and Riley exchanged a quick look of disbelief.

"You don't mean that little place next to the bar where we met you?" Kevin asked.

T.J. nodded. "Yeah, that's it."

"Eighteen feet," Sulu said, amazed at the wild cards fate had been dealing that night. "If we hadn't walked that extra eighteen feet we could have had a nice meal and gone back to the ship."

"No dead bodies," Kevin said, similarly impressed.

"No illegal drugs," Sulu replied.

"No being tortured or arrested."

"No crawling through ventilation shafts."

"And no me!" T.J. pointed out, topping off the list. "Can you imagine what a boring time I saved you from? Damn, what a couple of lucky guys!"

*** END ***


End file.
